Pattern based modelling with Archi

When managing models, it is often interresting to group related elements and relations, together with their properties and visual attributes (size, font, color...). Such groups are usually called Patterns and grouped inside customizable Toolboxes.

By default Archi doesn't support this, but in fact you can easily use it in a very similar way. For this I create a standalone model whose sole purpose is to contain such Patterns inside one or several views. I call such model a Toolbox.

Here is an example:

Then what most people don't know is that you can reorganize your workspace by moving tabs wherever you want, and this apply also to views, so I simply move my Toolbox view on the left so that it becomes an additional, Pattern based, palette:

You can then easily work on other models and copy/paste patterns from the Toolbox to the view you are working on.

This offers several advantages:

• You have a pattern based palette that keeps consistency of the pattern (even hidden/nested relations are copied)
• No more "(copy)" suffixes as the copy/paste operation is done across models
• All attributes are copied: Elements/relations properties but also visual properties.

Related post: https://forum.archimatetool.com/index.php?topic=187.0